ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of Jacques Derrida’s major writings, and draw out some of the primary religious themes. For Derrida, the pure possibility of religion concerns the promise, the possibility of making a promise and being responsible to and for another person. Derrida wants to show the limits of phenomenology by noting its dependence on speech as a kind of living, on which phenomenology bases its understanding of the Idea. Derrida’s early work is seen as more hostile to religion because he is showing how the opposition between speech and writing deconstructs, and how writing always already inhabits our notion of speech. In some ways, Derrida’s presentation, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” upstaged his elders and signalled a transition towards what became known as post-structuralism. In 1989, Derrida was invited to give an address at the Cardozo Law School by Drucilla Cornell, on the topic of “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice.”.
